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According to UK legal charity Reprieve documents released last night in the Binyam Mohamed civil court case reveal that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair personally overruled the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s demand for consular access to British ‘ghost’ prisoners.The secret documents, which can be found below, were shown to the court in heavily redacted form as part of the civil proceedings in the Binyam Mohamed civil case: Al Rawi and Others v Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Others.

The government has been responding to disclosure requests by maintaining that it has identified up to 500,000 documents that may be relevant, and says it has deployed 60 lawyers to scrutinise them, a process that it suggests could take until the end of the decade. It has failed to hand over many of the documents that the men’s lawyers have asked for, and on Friday failed to meet a deadline imposed by the high court for the disclosure of the secret interrogation policy that governed MI5 and MI6 officers between 2004 and earlier this year.

So far just 900 papers have been disclosed, and these have included batches of press cuttings and copies of government reports that were published several years ago. However, a number of highly revealing documents are among the released papers, as well as fragments of heavily censored emails, memos and policy documents.